The CHANGING SHAPE of the CBC

WHY THE NATIONAL BROADCASTER IS INVESTING IN OPINIONS, AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR NEWS. AN ESSAY BY DAVID BERRY.

The CBC has been plastering bus stops and billboards with ads for its new television season, but the national broadcaster’s most important fall launch is not a scripted series about a family who runs a convenience store. It is a reimagining of a significant section of the news division, the most vital service the CBC ultimately provides to Canadians.

Coming this fall to CBC.ca, is an opinion vertical, a space devoted exclusively to commentary and analysis of the day’s news.

As with almost anything the CBC tries, this shift has already drawn criticism. The most consistent has come from media circles, a variation on a common theme against most of CBC’s digital properties – that they have an unfair advantage over their competitors. With the sort of stable funding most media organizations can only dream of, the argument goes, the CBC’s ability to give both writers and advertisers a major national platform makes it much, much harder for smaller, independent news organizations to find a foothold, much less grow to stable size.

That is a point you could pretty easily level against the entire CBC apparatus, if you were so inclined. The whole discussion, though, is bit of a canard. Embedded within it, is a far more salient point, albeit one that is trickier to parse out. Namely that, in this media climate, it is irresponsible for the CBC to be offering commentary and opinion, particularly when it is doing so out of its own news budget.

In fairness here, an opinion section is not so much new to the CBC as it is a new emphasis: the CBC’s website has featured commentary, including specific columnists, since its inception, and talking heads are a staple of its radio and television broadcasts, from Cross-Country Check-up to the At Issue panel on The National.

This concentrated digital effort, though — full discloure, the CBC has hired Robyn Urback away from the National Post for this venture — signifies the growing prominence of opinion writing in the CBC stable. It also represents an effort to stay in line with the times: informed commentary – well, I mean, presumably informed, certainly commentary – having become one of the internet’s preferred ways of processing information and drawing eyeballs.

If you are willing to grant that the CBC does a lot of relevant and even otherwise unfeasible journalistic work outside of this commentary, however, the new emphasis ultimately raises questions about the purpose of media: why is it actually important that we should have the media, and in particular a publicly funded version of it, in the first place? The answer is not quite as straightforward as it would seem. Or at least, like most questions of purpose, it can get mixed up with a lot of other issues and concerns that affect it.

We are in themidst of a great debate about the value of media: the rather dire financials of most media organizations has encouraged both people who make it and people who want to keep consuming it to figure out what separates media – or maybe more precisely, journalism – from any other pleasant diversion. The answer typically boils down to the fact that journalism and the access to information it provides is an essential a pillar of democracy Put another way: in order to make anything resembling an educated decision about how to live in the world, we need the media to find and report on stories that are capable of changing how we see the world: stories that undermine the official narrative, that bring to light something that would rather be kept dark, that try to understand the world as it actually is, not just as we’d like to be.

The obvious examples are the grand, scandal-inducing stories about groping presidential candidates or egregiously wasted public money: “afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted” is how we might put it, if we were trying to inspire a room full of journalism grads walking into a world where 90ish per cent of their jobs are going to be in communications for powerful entities. We have reached the point in media contraction, though, where even more prosaic stories – such as your city council debating transit plans or proposing changes to the tax code – are in danger of going unreported. This kind of information might not bring down kings, but it represents the kind of simple but essential details that could easily get lost without a devoted media.

Assuming we can all agree that this is the media’s vital public role, the more cynical among us might still poke their heads up to note that a whole lot of our media, CBC or not, has precisely nothing to do with any of that. Even if we narrow our definition of media to places that also do some good, honest investigating and fact-finding, you will still find stuff such as interviews with baseball players on what kind of game they had, stories about which celebrities are divorcing, someone telling you that bike lanes are stupid and yes, even searching, self-aware inquisitions into what the role of the media is. Stuff that may reflect some of the rich tapestry of a well-lived life, say, but not exactly what you might deem necessary for the functioning of a healthy democracy.

The easiest explanation for all this sports and arts and lifestyle and opinion might be that it’s mostly vestigial. It may come as a shock to our modern race of cyborgs with constant access to a hive mind in their pocket, but general information used to be much, much harder to come by: box scores for the game between the Jays and the Cleveland Racist Stereotypes, sure, and what time the movie started and who directed it, yes, but also where one might find a used bookshelf, or where to apply for a job opening, if one were so inclined (the gutting of classified ad revenue was the first major hit to print-based media). Newspapers in particular used to be something more akin to community message boards, with occasional scoops.

As that information has become much, much easier to find, the sports and arts and lifestyle stuff has stuck around, perhaps out of nothing more than habit, but also because they are, relatively speaking, popular features that are easy to produce. This isn’t to say that anyone can write something worth reading about Auston Matthews’s four-goal debut, but that, compared to the time and effort of uncovering the mafia’s role in civic construction bids, it is pretty straightforward: the former requires the ability to watch a hockey game and maybe to Google, the latter months of potentially dangerous digging that could conceivably result in nothing publishable.

In this era, it is not egregious to say that the less relevant things help keep the lights on (albeit inefficiently) for the more obvious public good. By virtue of their relative ease, though, and the Internet’s incredible ability to disseminate information, these “easier” things are also being increasingly taken over by people and even sometimes organizations with no particular interest or concern for the harder things. Why sink a cost if people will pay you enough without bothering?

Commentary – at least as it’s practiced on editorial pages and on CBC News – exists somewhere between deep-diving investigations and interesting diversions. Considered analysis of politicians or legal issues or scandalous revelations certainly has more relevance to our understanding of a functioning democracy than does celebrity gossip, even though there wouldn’t be much on which to thoughtfully comment without original news gathering. Even if there is a wide range of quality – some is the result of interviews with many sources and relevant figures, some is people making up friends and borrowing block quotes with minimal attribution, most is somewhere in the middle, (hopefully) careful thought by people with a reasonable background in their subject – any debate on topics of public policy is good debate.

And yet the initial investment is still relatively low, with its ease of transmission still relatively high. So, more than ever, we have access to academic experts, those with personal experience, activists, or even just informed hobbyists, providing analysis to whoever is inclined to find it relevant. It would be naive to assume that this has raised the quality of this analysis, though it would be equally so to suggest that the biases of a few gatekeepers invariably found the most informed opinions before. The relevant point is that we are awash in any point of view you care to explore. Which brings us back to the CBC, and its opinions. It may once have been a relevant defence that it could give a platform to voices we might not otherwise he a r. But it ’s hard to credibly make that case when there are not only social media platforms and blogs but also functioning organizations – one could point to anything from Canadaland to The Ethnic Aisle, Rabble. ca to The Rebel – that are able to signal-boost these voices on a relatively minimal overhead.

On top of that, unlike its larger media brethren, CBC is not in a place whose survival depends on attracting a sufficient number of readers. If we assume that the media as a whole is engaged in keeping the lifeblood of democracy pumping, the continued presence of opinion and analysis (and sports and arts and crosswords) is something like triage: a priority only insomuch as we’re trying to keep as many alive as possible, by whatever means necessary. With relatively stable funding, CBC News doubling down on opinion is a doctor rushing a case of sniffles to the emergency room. Every dollar that the CBC spends on having someone explain the news to you is another it doesn’t have to pay someone to actually go and find it.

Slow-burn, deep-dive reporting already makes little financial sense in much of Canada, and as revenue streams and sideline attractions are slowly but surely pared off from existing media organizations, it will only be harder in more and more places. This will (if it hasn’t already) eventually extend to even the basic informative functions of journalism, that base-level information that keeps cities, provinces and territories running smoothly.

Right now, the CBC alone has the ability to keep information flowing to places like Whitehorse, Rimouski and Churchill. It may not be long before it is the only option for larger centres like St. John’s, Saskatoon and Kingston. That it aims to divert some of its source into telling you what to think about that information is to fundamentally misunderstand its terrain.

At a time when the most relevant public role of the media is under constant threat, the better metaphor for the CBC as a publicly funded institution might be a utility company. Able to traverse a vast country without the top-line relevance of profitability, it can provide a vital public service where others simply can’t. Opinion is not one of those services.